If you constantly have to deal with files for work, study or other personal activities PDFyou may have asked yourself, at least once, who invented this file formatwhat its acronym means and why it is so popular. The Californian software house “gave birth” to the PDF format Adobe in the now distant 1992derived from Camelot projectled by John Warnockco-founder of the company. The acronym PDF stands for Portable Document Format and it has become so popular precisely because it is extremely versatile and, indeed, portable. The success of the PDF format was so strong that in 2008 he even became one international standard with the ISO 32000-1:2008 standard.
Who invented the PDF format and when
The format PDF (Portable Document Format) was created by Adobe in 1992. In the 1990, John Edward Warnock – co-founder of the company, as well as a respected American mathematician and computer scientist, who passed away on August 19, 2023 – sensed that the world was about to enter a new digital era and the need to transform paper documents into electronic formats would materialize. This intuition led to the development of Camelot projectwhich was launched in August of that year, as evidenced by the photo shared by Adobe on its official blog regarding the six-page white paper entitled “The Camelot Project”.
The aim of the project was to with the aim of creating a format that would allow distribute and view electronic documents without altering their formatting. Before the arrival of PDF, each operating system required specific software to open certain files, often causing compatibility issues. PDF, on the other hand, guaranteed consistent viewing on any device, regardless of the software used. In the header of the aforementioned document, in fact, we read:
The objective of the project is to solve a fundamental problem that companies today (in 1990, Ed.) are facing. The problem concerns the ability to communicate visual material between different applications and computer systems. The specific problem is that most programs print to a wide range of printers, but there is no universal way to communicate and display this printed information electronically. (…) What industries absolutely need is a universal way to communicate documents across a wide variety of machine configurations, operating systems and communications networks. These documents should be viewable on any display and printable on any modern printer. If this problem can be solved, it will change the way people work.
The PDF format managed to fully achieve the objective proposed in the Camelot project.
What accounts for the success of the PDF format?
The diffusion of the PDF format is also due to the fact that this format has its roots in language PostScripta technology used for high-quality printing (which would later be renamed to Acrobat Distiller), also developed by Adobe. Unlike PostScript, however, PDF was not limited to printing, but allowed printing viewing documents on any type of screen. This concept, revolutionary for its time, changed the way we share and store documents, ensuring that the formatting, fonts and images of the latter remained essentially unchanged, regardless of the device used to read them.
The success of the PDF is also due to the fact that it is became an international standard in July 2008when the most important organization in the world for the definition of technical standards, namely theISO (International Organization for Standardization), has taken steps to recognize it as such by releasing the ISO 32000 standard. This, all things considered, has opened up the use of the format in professional, governmental and academic fields.
Another advantage of PDF is its ability to support complex content: In addition to text and images, a document in PDF format can contain hyperlinks, form fieldsand even audio And video. Furthermore, thanks to the possibility of electronically signing files, PDF is also a fundamental tool for managing contracts and legal documents.
Its versatility is also given by the presence of specific variants of the formatlike the PDF/Adesigned for document storage, and the PDF/Xused in the world of professional printing. This flexibility, combined with its reliability and universal compatibility, is the basis of the success of the PDF format.
